YOU NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THE JOB...

-This is why we have a constitution, people!
-If you exercised your constitutionally guaranteed powers and rights, your lives as mainstreeters with soccer practices and swim meets wouldn't get so screwed as often.


But this would mean you'd have to stop watching Survivor and American Idol. But I digress. Why exactly should fighting for more power within the machine matter?
Here's why I believe, in my not so humble way, that caring about these things matters. It matters because it directly impacts how we all live our lives, because like it or not we're all interconnected in this world. What happens to one affects the others in unpredictable ways, and because of this it is wise not to ignore the world outside our walls.


It becomes a tad difficult to provide for family, health, and stability when the basis of your substance is not in some measurable way controlled by you, but rather, owned by people lacking the slightest congruence of social values. Like, for example, the need of people with limited incomes and means to save money and plan ahead. The yearning for social stability in part derives from the fact that most of us live lives that requires constant vigilance and rational use of our limited resources. By and large we don't have deep pockets to burn through.
Unlike those that control most of the wealth of this country. http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/


The kicker to all of this is that the reason why we have constitutional rights, people, is for everyone to have a fair shake in the bargaining table of life in the United States. All citizens are citizens equally under the law, right? But I'm not getting the sense that this is how people are behaving.


What enrages me most is that, no matter where I go these days, the undercurrent of frustration and resentment is always there. People find themselves in straitened circumstances because of property taxes increasing, layoffs, or any other equally detrimental circumstances. Often times, a lot of these mishaps could have been avoided if the people had bothered to go to town hall meetings, had pressed their local governments. But I see no such organization.


So here’s what I’m doing. Look above you will see links to the Declaration of Independence. Try reading it. If you feel we are fighting the same battles today, then we need to stop living like children and do something. If you feel the same way as me, I leave the floor open to you in my blog

Its no wonder to me how the aristocratic gentry of America can lay off people by the millions for the gluttony their pals committed on the stock market. Middle class America has made itself a pawns with the ambigious values known as the middle class myth. As long this a social class as a whole doesn't act to empower itself or preserve its power, it will lose its position.

The combination of Soccer Moms and 9-5 routines aimed at preserving a total farce: the simple stable life with the house and kids. The middle class myth IS a farce when you stop ignoring divorce rates or inconvenient statistics on childhood poverty. Or the fact that social mobility in this country is no different than the banana republics of South America. If people truly believed in what they say they believe in, like a stable house with a family, how is it America has such an abysmally high divorce rate among other things?

This is how:

-Americans are conditioned to think that everything within their orbit is within their control. People are naturally afraid of larger forces they can't control.

-Since taking care of hearth, home, and fun time takes precedence over being involved, its child's play to erode the middle class's social power. If they get angry, lay them off, then say it was their fault. Do that for several decades they will get mindnumbed into thinking it was all unavoidable.

-The triumph of optimism over realism. If you just will it, it will happen.

Combine it all and its no wonder that, flood of college degrees aside, the whole middle class did nothing to fight the incremental repeal of Glass-Steagall in the 1990s. Did nothing during the lay off craze beginning in the 1980s. Did nothing to fight lawyers attempting to fight Sarbannes Oxaley. Most of all, we can count people to NEVER stand up to business elites b/c to fight business elites means to be a communist.

People gripped with the middle class myth cannot and will not separate honest business from corruption in the top ranks, will swallow what the boss says b/c no one do anything that will jeopardize their house and family.

Think about it this way. If standing up for yourself ever meant being thrown into the streets, to be pooped on by employers, the truth is that one side has way too much power than the other. Today in America doing the right thing and standing up to employers means to be fired, and biting unemployment.

It should have never gotten that way people!

Everyone in the middle class thought that someone among their ranks would do the 'right' thing can campaign for a fair share for years. As long as they all thought that, no one bothered to act, b/c they all thought someone else would. Thus no one did anything.

Upward mobility is dead because people with high positions and power generally DON'T like new comers, and when they all view the middle class with disdain, its probably not surprise that they would start denying opportunities en masse to everyone else under them. It'll always be dead while people continue to play by rules that don't work.

But please don't take my word for it, that its hard to maintain anything in this world unless you first aren't willing to learn the world, here is an author that hits on much of these themes entire. Please visit this link!

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-sided-Relentless-Promotion-Positive-Undermined/dp/0805087494

Irony comes in many shapes and guises. It was ironic that Galileo, a poor man with revolutionary views on the cosmos ended up vilified by elites who in their heyday claimed to be open to “intellectual” debate. It is ironic that we live in a globalizing age where a bomb that goes off in Cairo effects stock markets in a few seconds, yet most of us in our sadly gated communities couldn’t name our neighbors. It is also ironic in my view that blaming students for being unmotivated intellectually tends to come from faculty and administrators, in response as to why colleges have become dull intellectual places with lackluster international performance records.

So here is my view. Stop blaming the students so uncritically, and let’s start blaming the faculty. And let’s not set up a bogeyman of school boards that don’t seem to care, or City treasurers with a miserly grip on the coffers. Now here is how I ground this shift in finger pointing.

Firstly, it’s the faculty who set the curricula. It’s the faculty that develop their study guides, their tests, and run their classrooms. It’s the faculty that are largely control the monopoly on information in the classroom; after all, it’s none other than the professor that gives the A or the F. So let’s use common sense: it’s the faculty that deem ideas rational or not, correct or not, while they have their golden moments in the classroom. For all these reasons and more, I’m going to abandon the coquettishly fashionable view that sees the student as the captain of the college seaship. In my new view, it’s really the faculty that are captains of the vessel.

This is not an indictment against grades or homework. This is an indictment against those that find unmotivated students filling the classrooms. Faculty are stewards of the boat. If the students are unmotivated to learn, unmotivated intellectually, in my perspective, this results from faculty who are also equally unmotivated intellectually.

Now all finger pointing is only critical of me to say. We live in an era facing incredible economic pressures. We have a recession, a two-front war, a sliding value of the dollar, rising economic giants India and China, collapsing populations in the West and booming populations in the East. Perhaps students aren’t motivated intellectually nowadays because what’s being said in the classroom does not link the ideas on the chalkboard to the hard reality outside. It’s a question of priorities- while professors keep their paychecks and tenured status; students are being grinded through a mill that constantly reminds them of how unmotivated they all are.

If faculty had to face the same grim realities of a sunken labor market that would be one thing. However in my surmise, this is not true. If this were really true, then how it is time and again I meet students so completely oblivious; trying to live up to the stereotypical uncouth, ‘I don’t know why I’m here’ mystique of the college experience. I once blamed the students 100% for this, but not now. This happens because faculty, with their exalted ivory tower thrones, continually feed misinformation about what awaits students when they leave. “Study what you want, focus on what you enjoy,” or “look at the income earnings of college degrees overtime,” etc. A lot of times these statistics are so ambiguous it’s hard to directly refute, and why would we? It would be a tad unsettling to go to college and yet know the worth of your degree was questionable at best.

What this chipper viewpoint does is alter reality. See, great winners, like chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, good football teams, etc, grow in performance from training and studying victories AND failures, from knowing how they are weak and why. Its not a question of pessimism; its common sense. How often are we treated to statistics of college graduates stuck at Starbucks or McDonald’s for five years straight? Of MBAs living hand to mouth in a labor market that simply hasn’t provided the jobs? If I saw faculty alerting students to the bad as well as the good, this article would be unnecessary.

However I don’t see that happening and in such dark times it’s distressing. What is happening in effect is the mill is running young minds in on highly warped yet overly optimistic views on the economic realities facing them after graduation. This is a betrayal of a whole generation at work. So yes it is a question of priorities: do we ruffle the feathers of a Ph.d that hasn’t seen the unemployment lines stretching, or do we finally let go of this mystique of college as being a bastion where the unkempt looking and oblivious can rest assured great times are always just around the corner? It’s our youth vs. injured pride. There should be no question about which priority gets put first.

Now its only polite to offer a solution since I pointed blame. Those students and faculty that would agree with me how utterly idiotic it is to always and only point to the good and great and not the bad and ugly about college and its aftermaths need to meet together. We need to meet together and start a new counter movement in our school so that we can really strive for the best. Instead of sweeping all this under the rug and then blaming the students for ignorance and lethargy, let’s actually TRY to think innovatively for once to save this generation from being chewed up in the grist mill of a nearly bottomless recession economy.

Why this Recovery is a Recession

Fact: Unemployment rate rises to 9.8 percent as 263,000 jobs are cut

-AP News

Fact: -5.3% change in real annual earnings 2000-2008 for full time worker males with a

Bachelors (18-24), and -1.2% change for females with a bachelors (18-24)

-Michael Mandel: “Yet More on Young College Grads” Businessweek

Fact: Newsweek’s August 3rd cover featured a balloon with the lettering “The Recession is Over! But good luck surviving the recovery!” Then not to skip a beat, the illustrious Harvard Business Review (even the ink on its pages wreaks of prestige) takes the cake with an article in its July/August 2009 edition titled: “Constant Change: Leadership in a Permanent Crisis.” Without even bothering to tackle the thorny depths of what permanent change really means one thing is certain-this is no recovery with any sort of confidence with the people that really matter: Main Street America.
Main Street America is America. This is not a matter of speculation, it is an indefensible fact of what a country is-the people, not the territory. People make the country. When America feels no confidence in its economic direction, one can only wonder when people will stop giving authorities the benefit of the doubt simply because they have authority. In today’s case the nation is obviously still hurting too badly to have any sort of confidence in its economic future. Go to the sort of ‘job fairs’ they have in Chicago these days if you really doubt this.

Others may argue that this is just a pessimistic message and I counter that it is not. Stating the obvious is not pessimistic. What is lacking now is real legitimacy. Authorities that are continually optimistic while the country thinks otherwise do not state reality. When real earnings for male college grads have slipped for the whole decade, among rising unemployment and other facts, the legitimacy behind the data that Newsweek and other major news outlets have used: a rising stock market, do not hold legitimacy because the numbers do not reflect the reality for Main Street America.
The Stock Market fell precisely because the proper fundamentals behind the numbers-business/finance fundamentals-were not practiced. Banks that give out loans to customers that cannot repay their loans are not practicing fundamentals. Fortune 500 companies that regularly practice accounting fraud are simply not practicing fundamentals. So what must be argued is that, while the Stock Market might show improvement because of proper fundamentals, it also might not. This is not a contradiction when the Stock Market is understood for what it is instead of what Wall Street wants it to be. The Stock Market is there for the public trading of corporate stock (hence stock market, a market for stocks). The scrolling stock numbers are just indexed summaries of trading. Remember what Enron taught us in the 1990s, that the valuations behind a company’s stock may reflect fraud or simple hubris.

This is not to say that American business is wholly bad, American business is the reason why America owes its high living standards. However, Corporate America since the 1980s onwards has had long history of largesse and corruption. If you need any proof of that observe the psychological biography of Corporate Elitism in the book Den of Thieves, by James Stewart or The Smartest Guys in the Room, by Bethany McLean. That one bank, corporation, or accounting firm after another for the last twenty years has been indicted or bankrupted by corrupt men is not surprising. It happens when Main Street America does not exercise rational scrutiny in the lords of the land: Main Street’s employers. Until we exercise some scrutiny into the logical grounds of how authority figures declare a recovery when the rest of us feel stuck in a recession, we will continue to have recessions that are recoveries.

It's because they think we're stupid, people.

Because when we're stupid, officials start getting awards for doing their jobs. Ben Bernanke, the Harvard-educated scholar of the Great Depression, who did not see this 'Recession' coming, suddenly received the Time Person of the Year Award, for doing his job. Ostensibly, so goes Time's reasoning in a nutshell, Bernanke deserves the award because were it not for his decisive actions in 2009 in coordinating with other banking officials in the U.S. and around the world, the Recession would have certainly become a Depression.

But never mind the logic of the situation. The hard truth of men like Ben Bernanke is that, mathematics formulas aside, they dabble and delve in Social Sciences, not the Natural Sciences. You just can't predict or prove any roughshod formula, dictate, theory or creed in Social Science precisely because of the fact that these kinds of things aren't repeatable; the circumstances that created them constantly change.

What follows is this: Ben Bernanke’s occupation, while a hard one, is by no means an occupation with reputable success or failure benchmarks. It's easier to be an Einstein in physics than it is to be an Max Weber in sociology. We simply have no idea whether or not Ben Bernanke’s actions merit such an award. That’s the hard life of the field he chose to take up. His job as Fed Chairman is to enact stable monetary policy. If the economy rebounds because of his actions as Fed Chairman, then he is simply doing his job as Fed Chairman. The Federal Reserve itself is there to help guide and enact monetary policy, after all.

If Ben Bernanke coordinates with other central bankers in other countries, people, it might be a sign he’s just doing his job, because he understands that the globalized nature of the economy these days makes international coordination essential. Thus, Time has given the man an award for just doing his job, and logically we will never know if his actions really merit acknowledgement or not.

Giving people awards for simply doing their jobs is a bad precedent. It's enough for some people to get Nobel Peace prizes. But enough is enough. Stop giving people praise for doing their jobs.

And the only reason it happened was because they (the powers that bestow awards) seem to think we (people without the power to bestow awards) are too dumb to recognize this obvious fact and voice the ridiculousness of it.